it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall
James Davies

////// 212 pages
Size: 14.5 x 21 CM
 
it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall consists of 201 minimalist poems that come in pairs of lines. The lines play against each other – there’s a push and pull between bliss and bathos creating a magical fuzziness. Individual lines slip in and out of single and specific meaning, like Necker cubes and duck-rabbits; bisociation is constructed by the rub of plurals against possessives, and the distortion of verbs and articles. Many of the poems have also been made into one-off book objects by the author, and a list of influences on the poems features at the end of the collection and gives an indication of potential themes.
 
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James Davies’ writing includes the poetry collections stack
(Carcanet, 2017) which is a book-length, minimalist poem, that explores and documents experimental walking practice, as well as Plants from Reality Street, a set of conceptual poems. He is also the author of two novels: The Wood Pigeons (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019), which is a tale of a night-in, where chapters are slenderised page by page, and When Two Are in Love or As I Came To Behind Frank's Transporter (Crater Press, 2019, written in collaboration with Philip Terry), an Oulipian psychedelic romantic comedy. His latest prose is the short story The Ten Superstrata of Stockport J. Middleton (Ma Bibliothèque, 2020), ten rewrites of the first page of Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.